So I finally watched “Into Darkness” today. I was going to wait until it was on Netflix, as I didn’t want to specifically spend money to see it, but my wife’s love of Benedict Cumberbatch drove her to the nearest Redbox to rent it.

I was already fully versed in the plot, so I concentrated more on the performances and dialogue. Best was Urban, followed by Quinto. Same as the first film, really. Everyone else felt underused. Pegg/Scotty was used much less as comic relief this time, but still not great. Cumberbatch was adequate and villainous in the role, but his performance doesn’t disguise that it’s a whitewashed piece of casting. Saldana had a couple of decent moments, but could have been more, and Eve was sadly little more than eye-candy.

When I compare it to Pacific Rim, which I love immensely, it comes up short in many ways. Del Toro’s film was a labour of love; Abrams’ effort felt like a cynical exercise in fan exploitation (right the way down to quoting verbatim lines from Wrath of Khan). It’ll never happen, but Pacific Rim’s creative team would do a far better job of expressing the fundamental humanity of Roddenberry’s creation because something closely akin to it was very much on display; it’s one of the reasons why I’m such a kaiju groupie.

Recalling the last thing Khan says to Admiral Marcus — “You should have let me sleep!” — I can’t help but think that Abrams should have done the same with the Star Trek franchise.

The other day I was browsing through some of my older RPG files, with character sheets dating back to the mid ’80s, and I found an old friend. Tibis Alhet, created 12th of October 1986.

Those who know me well, at least in MMO terms, will recognise the name Tibis—it is the name of my universal rogue, and my how he has changed in 24 years.

The original Tibis was an AD&D High-Elf Fighter / Magic-User / Thief. I don’t remember too many details of his personality, although he must have had a habit of sticking his hands in harm’s way, as there’s a note in the spell book supplement that his right hand had “wonky fingers”.

The next time the name appeared in my consciousness was in 1999, when I was staring at the character creation screen for EverQuest, with a new Barbarian rogue, and it came to me as a character name I’d used before with roguish connections. It was here that the first inkling of my modern take on Tibis started to take form, as I put him down as being a follower of Bristlebane, the god of rogues, and a trickster figure. Over the following five years in-game and in short stories, he moved between a boisterous professional, to a figure tormented by dark visions, to being a cynical opportunist, and finally as a retired semi-hermit continuously bothered by local thieves with something to prove.

About this time I was hoping to take him back to the tabletop, as I had bought quite heavily into Swords and Sorcery’s OGL EverQuest line. Alas, though, none of my gaming circle was keen on the idea of playing a tabletop game based on a MMO, so this incarnation never got past the writing up of a converted character sheet for him.

In 2004 I moved from EverQuest to the sequel, EverQuest II. Of course, I had to have a Barbarian rogue called Tibis. Here I gave him some backstory that he believed that he was related to the original EverQuest Tibis, but he couldn’t be sure of the exact connection as he suffered from considerable amnesia, with a subtext that he was the original, flung through time and reduced in power and stature. Given his adventures in the Plane of Time, I felt that this was reasonably plausible.

His character in EverQuest II was greatly influenced by the name of the rogue class that was open to him—Swashbuckler. He returned to the boisterous, cheerful and slightly overbearing archetype that the class name implies and stayed quite firmly there, being reinforced substantially when Bristlebane was reintroduced to Norrath.

Since then, I’ve had a Tibis in both World of Warcraft and D&D Online, but neither game has the kind of background hooks that gave me the ideas for additional personality development that I had in other MMOs. Warcraft almost had it with the Ravenholdt location and quest lines, but they were never expanded and since rendered strictly optional.

Finally, after Players Handbook 2 was released, I’ve found a new interest in bringing him back to the tabletop with the release of the Goliath race. They share traits of being large, boisterous, strong and athletic with the Barbarians of EverQuest, and their take on life being a competition would be an interesting extension of Tibis’ trickster tendencies. Alas, the most suitable deity—Olidammara—had been written out of fourth edition, but Avandra makes a decent substitute. The only thing I’m hoping for is that Goliaths get an Essentials-style option for an attribute bonus. Goliath fluff strongly indicates that dexterity would be in keeping for a secondary option, and regardless of whether strength or constitution becomes the fixed bonus I’d be happy.

It’s been a long journey for Tibis, from the tabletop to the MMO and (almost) back to the tabletop again, but he’s evolved considerably over the years and I fully expect him to continue to change as I bring him to other games.

It happens to all campaigns. People aren’t able to make a session. The Dungeon Master is feeling burnt out. Players want to do something different (but still play D&D) after a particularly intense session. So, it’s time for a filler game.

This happens regularly with the group I play with; we’re all 30- and 40-somethings, with jobs, families and other responsibilities. Often when we aren’t playing in either of the two campaigns we’re happy to play Dominion, Space Hulk, or some other game, but as often as not, we’ve turned to delves to get our fix of fun.

The delve format was one of the niftier ideas Wizards came up with for fourth edition. A self-contained adventure in three encounters; short enough to be run in one evening, long enough to allow exhaustion of daily resources and with an all-important milestone before the capstone fight.

Delves can be dropped into existing campaigns as an interlude, or they can be run as a one-off. As the latter they’re a good venue for players to try out classes, builds and options they might not otherwise consider, and running one can give a new Dungeon Master (or a rusty one) a chance to become familiar with the technical aspects of the role without having to worry about world building or what kind of story consequences Thrud the Barbarian will incur for eviscerating the mayor’s son with a rusty spork. WotC has published quite a lot of support for the format, including a hard-cover release dedicated to them and numerous delves in other books and Dungeon magazine.

For us, though, one of the fun parts of D&D is the feeling that you’re progressing a character and, while our regular campaigns give us that satisfaction, our schedules do mean that we’re slower at that than other groups – in two years we’ve gained six levels in one campaign and eight levels in the second. There was obviously potential there for a custom campaign rule-set that would give us entertainment during off weeks as well as give us another advancement-based campaign. We exchanged some emails and discussed it over a couple of lunches, and we came up with the following:

The campaign is story-light and combat-heavy. We’ve got the two main campaigns for more role-play and story-based entertainment. Delves use a plot hook to create a thematic link between the three encounters, but there’s nothing to say we have to link each delve to the last (or the next).

Each character advances separately. Not everyone is going to make each delve session by definition, and this opens up some interesting ideas around having a (modest) spread of levels.

Each player can have multiple characters, but only one is played on a given week. This allows players to be able to choose a play-style according to their mood and have options available no matter the level of the week’s adventure.

There will always be five characters going into a delve. We created generic “filler” characters, one for each role, to fill in gaps in party composition. They’re usually rotated between the present players in a given session, take full shares of the treasure, and will be given simple but effective builds.

The role of Dungeon Master is not fixed to a single player. One of the points of the filler game is to give the regular Dungeon Masters a rest, and to give players who haven’t gone behind the screen before a chance to do so.

Advancement is accelerated. Each delve is three encounters. Bonus XP is granted at the end equal to two more encounters of the level of the delve. Two such delves should gain a character a level. Additionally, five treasure parcels are apportioned as well, to make sure characters don’t fall behind on expected equipment levels.

Retraining is made slightly less restrictive. With the potential for delve sessions to be a fair amount of time apart, and with an expectation that new content would be published for the classes in those intervals, we made it so that players could rebuild characters almost from the ground up once per tier.

House rules would be kept to a minimum. This was to keep tracking them relatively simple.

We can try out some unusual ideas. While this appears to contradict the point above, this does give us an opportunity to try some interesting ideas we’ve had. One such is the idea that the magic item economy can be at least partially driven by the PCs, although we’ve not done enough sessions yet for that to get off the ground.

We’ve had a few sessions of this so far, and it seems to be working out quite well. We’ve got one player interested in Dungeon Mastering for the first time, and we’ve already had one session with some characters at level one, and others at level two going through a slightly modified level two delve. We’ve not quite got to the point where the PC magic item market can get going, and we’ve yet to decide what impact the recently introduced magic item rarity system will have on it, but we have high hopes for that.

It’s interesting that gamers are portrayed as an anti-social lot, because to me we’re incredibly dependant on our communities. I wouldn’t have had half the experience of the original EverQuest that I did if I hadn’t participated on The Safehouse, and my tabletop gaming suffered greatly during the mid-2000’s when I was living an hour or so away from the good gaming community I had been in before.

The Internet has, of course, made the formation of such substantially easier – and their destruction, too. Forums and blogs can, with a little promotion and persuasion, build up a quality following. And with an extended period of downtime, this following can easily disperse and find other venues.

Welcome to this journal, where on occasion I will hopefully interest and entertain you with thoughts and opinions on the games I play.

While I’ve long maintained a blog on LiveJournal, I have recently felt the urge to set up my own platform on this domain, which I’ve owned for a few years now. Part of this urge was a desire for me to separate my more mundane observations from my discourses on games; another part was a desire to fiddle with WordPress!

Please feel free to leave feedback on any post through the comments system, and I do hope you enjoy your stay.